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‘You’re late.’
    ‘You’re not the only crew I’ve got,’ says Tiernan with a grin. ‘But if you’d like to make something of it, I’m all ears.’
    Dust and curlicues of cigarette smoke are caught in the bare strip light. The only sound is the squeal and crash of metal being mangled.
    ‘Thought not,’ Tiernan says. ‘So what have you got for me, boys? If you’re in a hurry, I don’t want to keep you.’
    Severin pulls a memory stick from the back pocket of his jeans. Mr Tiernan opens the laptop and plugs the attachment into a USB port on the side. The display on the screen is reflected in the lenses of his glasses as he scrolls down.
    ‘Porsche Cayenne. Very good, boys,’ he says presently. ‘Very good indeed.’
    Over by the door Delon, who has been holding his breath, lets it out noisily.
    Tiernan closes the laptop and zips up the case. ‘There’ll be some good commission on this one all right, boys,’ he says.
    ‘When do you want it done?’ says Severin.
    ‘I’ll need to sort the paperwork,’ says Mr Tiernan. ‘I’ll let you know.’
    At the door he pauses and stoops to pick up Delon’s discarded newspaper.
    ‘You read about this stiff they found in Enrico Cabaljo’s back garden?’ he says, unrolling the paper and flapping the front page at the four men. ‘I reckon they should sign him up. Got to be better than the midfield they’ve got at the moment.’
    Vos and Seagram get back to the West End at midday, having spent a fruitless morning waiting for any sort of definitive forensic reports from the scene or DNA identification of the victim. All they have is the postmortem result, which does not answer the pressing questions that lie at the heart of the whole conundrum, namely who is Ahmed Doe? And why did someone tie him to a railway bridge?
    On the way upstairs to the second floor, Vos’s phone rings.
    ‘Get the team ready in the meeting room,’ he tells Seagram, peering at the number on the screen. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute.’
    When he eventually stalks onto the floor of the Bug House five minutes later, it seems to Seagram that Vos is in an even worse mood than before.
Who the hell was the call from?
she wonders.
The tax man?
What worries her is that any second now the boss’s black dog is going to start ripping out throats. As he heads across to the meeting room, she hurries across to intercept him.
    ‘Boss, the replacement is here,’ she says, careful not to say ‘the replacement for Entwistle’.
    He stops and looks down at her. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’
    The meeting room is a cosy little annexe separated from the squad room by a partition wall. Its focal point is a large pull-down screen for the overhead projector, but as no one has ever figured out how the projector works in over ten years, the screen is used instead as an oversized memo board and is scarred with pinholes, Sellotape marks and crusts of Blu-tack from hundreds of different cases. Right now the board looks distinctly bare: a handful of assorted photographs from the scene, a map of the area around Stannington, a few desultory Post-it notes.
    The squad is assembled and waiting.
    ‘I take it you’ve all met DC Ptolemy,’ Vos says, sweeping past them on his way to the board, and Ptolemy, who feels like the new girl in a classroom where everyone knows each other and, more importantly, knows the teacher, finds herself with a rictus smile on her face and wondering if she should wave or give a bow or just stand up and curtsey.
    Instead she looks for help from Huggins and Fallow, with whom she has spent most of the morning, but they are just staring ahead with grim faces, as if they can sense teacher is in a bad mood. As for the other guy –
Calvert
? – he’s only just arrived himself and hasn’t made a sound, other than a dismissive grunt on his way to the nearest computer terminal. In fact, as she looks round the room, the only one who meets her gaze is the only other woman on the squad,